The Hands of History

To tell the truth, I'm not entirely sure why Bennett was distracted by his story's hormonal implications, as they never quite dovetail with his cogent exploration of the value of knowledge. At its most vital, The History Boys amounts to a dialectical cage match between two opposing worldviews. In the red corner, weighing in at what looks to be about 320 pounds, is General Studies prof Hector (Richard Griffiths), an O-captain-my-captain aesthete who believes that learning is its own reward. Dispensing with traditional lesson plans, Hector encourages his charges to improvise miniature dramas, the better to galvanize their interest—an approach that doesn't sit well with the school's cartoonishly fussy headmaster (Clive Merrison), who's obsessed with landing his best and brightest at Oxford and Cambridge. To that end, the headmaster hires a hip young tutor, his own diploma scarcely even dog-eared. Thus, in the blue corner, maybe 150 pounds sopping wet, we find Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), who insists that truth and beauty are irrelevant—what matters, at least for aspiring Oxbridgers, is originality, the ability to devise an oblique angle on any given subject. For Irwin, scholarship is a game, the object of which is to startle the admissions drones out of their complacency. The right answer is whatever will work.

Just when you're settling in for a rousing, eloquent tussle between classicism and pragmatism, though, Bennett complicates matters by revealing both of his role models as benign lechers. Hector rides to and from school on a motorcycle, and volunteers each day to give one of his students a lift home; the boys willingly take turns, despite knowing that their beloved professor's hand will find its way into their lap at every stoplight en route. Irwin, meanwhile, develops a smoldering crush on Dakin (Dominic Cooper), the most charismatic of the lot—and though Dakin is ostensibly straight, he seems more than willing to dispense blowjobs in lieu of the traditional apple on the desk. Before long, questions of pedagogy have been subsumed by all this carnal melodrama; the lesson the audience will take away, given Bennett's sympathetic scolding, is that sexual abuse is just a charming peccadillo when committed by a poetic soul.

Bennett can't actually say that, of course, which is where the film's weirdly retro attitude toward homosexuality comes into play. (WARNING: I can't address this without spoiling the end of the movie, so save this paragraph for later if you plan to see it.) In theory, the characters' orientation shouldn't really matter—the offense involves the abuse of trust between an adult authority figure and a child. But I invite you to imagine The History Boys as The History Girls, with fat, sixtyish Hector groping his hand beneath teenage skirts every afternoon on his motorcycle. Does he still seem misguided but fundamentally decent, a good man being unjustly persecuted for a minor sin borne of pure affection? Because that's how Hector is portrayed here. (Irwin is viewed somewhat more critically, but his prospective dalliance with Dakin still comes across as no big deal.) And since Bennett can't quite bring himself to openly condone such aberrant behavior, he resorts to the same solution that dramatists used in the '50s and '60s when tackling gay desire: empathize for two hours, then kill 'em off. When Irwin climbed on the back of Hector's motorcycle near film's end, I actually waved goodbye at the screen. Even well into the 21st century, these men are just too sensitive to live.